


Oblivion

by Miss_Peletier



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 4x12 - Freeform, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, aka Emily writes her feelings about 4x12 and ends up writing eleven thousand words, season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-11-02 11:50:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10943913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Peletier/pseuds/Miss_Peletier
Summary: “Forgive me,” he whispers, and it’s as much a plea as it is a prayer.The events of the final hours before Praimfiya and the following five years from Marcus Kane's perspective, and how they affect his relationship with Abby Griffin.





	Oblivion

**Author's Note:**

> Just so you guys know, I cried writing every subsection of this. These two fictional idiots have destroyed me. 
> 
> So...I hope you enjoy!

It’s almost monotonous, he thinks, in the silent, pulsating pain of it all.

After all, it’s a system they’ve been employing for the past hour, a step-by-step process they devised to make sure every single member of their people gets an equal chance at surviving the death wave. They walk in, show him their name on the slip, he says a few words of affirmation that taste bitter on his lips. They leave. Again and again, they come, show him the paper, and leave.

Some are angered, some are shocked, some, just white-faced and trembling, disbelieving. But all of it ends the same way. He’s left with their lives on sheets of paper, heartbeats etched in names on scraps in a bowl.

It’s almost monotonous, and it damn well could be – if he were a different man, a man who ignores the pain of his people. But as it is now, he sits in his chair next to the bowl with his heart in his throat and his stomach lurching. The pin on his jacket means it’s his duty to save them, but why does it feel like he’s doing the opposite?

He’s meant to protect them, to ensure their survival, and by some twisted path of fate, that’ll mean hundreds of them must perish.

He can hardly look at the bowl itself, the weight of the task at hand pressing harder on his chest each time his eyes fall upon it. So he decides to do something else – to place his gaze elsewhere – somewhere safe, somewhere warm. The only place that can offset the ever-present pain of playing a paradoxical role: the Chancellor and the deliverer of death.

Abby Griffin stands in the corner of the room, both a few feet and an ocean away. She’d decided to be here with him instead of outside the room, accompanied him without a word exchanged. From the dull ache in her eyes, he knew she understood his pain – knew he’d need her here just as much as she needed him. Having her in the room, he thought, might just be the only thing keeping down the lump in his throat.

They don’t talk. And truly, what is there to say? He knows her pain, feels it as keenly as she does, although he reassured her she had no reason to feel it at all. Her choice was the right one, the best decision any of them could have made with the information they had at the time. The moment the hatch opened and Bellamy emerged…thinking back on it sent a low, simmering thrill through him, an instinctive rush at the realization of salvation.

Marcus Kane did not consider himself a selfish man, but the thought of seeing her again, holding her close, hearing her voice…she’d saved him in so many ways, and not just by opening the door.

After David Miller walked in, unfolded his paper, and demonstrated that he intended to sacrifice himself for a chance at Nathan’s survival, he felt her demeanor begin to shift. She’d been distant throughout the process, as he knew she would be. This was not the time for closeness, for them to hold each other and to revel in being together again. But this was something different, a final string cut in the fraying fabric of her composure, and he sensed it as soon as David spoke.

So after he David left, leaving in his wake an agony that couldn’t be dispersed, Marcus did the thing he thought he wouldn’t do: he requested a moment alone with the woman who kept him whole.

“Can we have a moment?” he asks the guards at the door, who respond with a nod and close the door behind them.

Even at the end of the world, with midnight fast approaching, the hierarchy of Ark laws is respected. As Chancellor, he is allowed to have this – to have a moment with her - and for perhaps the only time since the doomsday clock struck its final hour, he is thankful for the title he holds.

Standing from his chair, he closes the minimal distance between them in a few long strides. Being close to her now is a balm and an abrasion, a healing kind of sting.

Something is wrong.

Something is wrong with her, something that needs to be cured, and she won’t tell him what it is. Marcus has no doubt she has her reasons – Abby Griffin always does – but that doesn’t make it all hurt less, doesn’t still the lurch in his heart every time he thinks about that snippet of conversation that she made clear was never meant for his ears.

She looks at him with a gaze haunted, soil-brown eyes dark with regret and remorse. Even in her pain she’s beautiful, breathtaking even, but her agony is his own and he doesn’t have time to dwell on the way being close to her feels. God willing, he thinks, they might have time for that after the clock reaches zero.

He doesn’t want to think about what else that notion implies.

Marcus knows he’s not the only one who feels the wind knocked out of them when a slip is added to that bowl, he’s not the only one that feels those papers sanding down the edges of his heart. The difference is, she’s convinced she’s the only one to blame. It’s the farthest thing in the world from the truth – a lie her brain whispers to her and he’s done his best to erase – but he hasn’t worked hard enough, because he sees that untruth in her gaze when she looks up at him. It shatters something deep inside him, seeing her like this, chips away at him when he fails to put her back together.

So he says the only thing he can say.

“It’s not your fault.”

She doesn’t give him a moment to breathe, the sound of their people murmuring through the door all but muted by the certainty in her voice.

“Yes, it is,” she says, her words accompanied by a small nod, and he feels something deflate inside him. “I opened that door.”

“You did what you thought was right,” he says, following her lead, her sentiments finding no home with him. She had made a choice for their people – for him. That was the pattern of their lives, the fate they were forced to re-live over and over again until it wore them down, and she’d had only the best intentions in her heart.

“Was it?” she says, a tremor at the end of her question that makes his stomach flip. He’s seen her like this before, in the ruins of TonDC, buried beneath a broken city. She was as shattered then as she is now, buried beneath the ruins of her own choices instead of a grounder city.

She says his name, and he swallows hard.

“Yes,” he says, determined. It’s an answer to her question and a prayer – _please, Abby. You did the right thing._

“We do what’s right, and three hundred and sixty four of our people die,” she says. And it’s more apparent then than it’s been before, bleeding through in her posture and her barely audible words, a weariness that goes deeper than bone, a remorse that radiates from deep inside her. Seeing her like this, her confidence drained, her certainty evaporated and her gaze hollow…it’s almost enough to break him, too.

But he can’t break, he can’t bend, because what she needs right now is hope.

So he steps forward, closing the small gap that remains between them, places his hands on her shoulders and steadies his voice.

“You saved so many others,” he says, and she has to believe him, she has to, because it’s a fact and it’s the truth and it’s the essence of who she is: a doctor, a life-saver by nature. He can’t think too hard about what he’s considering saying next, or it’ll never reach his lips.

“You saved me,” he says, fighting to keep his voice steady, “and I don’t just mean by opening that door.”

A flicker then, something shimmering, something that, if only for a heartbeat, gives him hope before her lips tremble again, before she says the thing that rips his heart from his chest.

“I don’t know who I am anymore.”

And with that she walks away, crosses the room, leaving him with his own words echoing in his ears, a bitter accompaniment to her own.

_First we survive, then we find our humanity again._

He, too, had been making choices with the only options he had available to him at the time, given advice with the best of intentions at heart. If the nightblood had worked, if they could have distributed it, if it had been the cure for the raging disease that was Primfiya…

But it wasn’t.

And instead of healing Abby Griffin, his words had infected her.

A pang of guilt resonates throughout his body as he remembers their conversation, remembers her conflicted feelings on testing the nightblood. He had said it because it seemed like the right thing to say, it seemed like the thing she needed to hear, it seemed like it would comfort her and reassure her when her world had been thrown from its axis.

“The things that I let myself do, in that lab…”

_First we survive, then we find our humanity again._

And hers was still intact, that much he knew. Abby Griffin was not a woman to lose the essence of herself to the rages of Primfiya, to the radiation-soaked world that had forced her hand.

But just because he believes it, doesn’t mean she does.

“I told you,” he whispers, having followed her to the other side of the room, reaches forward to place a comforting hand on her shoulder again. Every tremble of her lips is a crack in his heart. “We will find our humanity again.”

She stares at him for what feels like an eternity, reaches up and strokes his cheek. It should feel good, he knows, should send a wave of warmth through him the way it did in Polis. But her gaze is laden with dread, her touch trembling, and he finds himself more afraid of the contact than relishing in it. Something is terribly wrong.

“I need you to pull eighty-one names from that bowl,” she says, and the world stops turning.

“Abby,” he says, barely whispering, not trusting his faulty vocal chords to support the weight of his full voice. And everything inside him is screaming, aching, crying for her to understand, for her to see herself the way he sees her – not only as essential personnel, but as a good person, a pure heart, a woman innocent of the crimes for which she is condemning herself.

“When that door closes today, I need to be on the other side,” she says. It’s a tone he’s never heard from her before, a broken kind of clarity, as though she’s spent the duration of their time in this room making this decision. Perhaps he should feel betrayed, hurt, but all he feels is broken.

“Please,” he murmurs, his hands trailing down to rest on her hair, her jaw, her neck. He’ll beg her if he has to, plead on both knees, but the universe is cruel and heartless and will not give him more than this moment to change her mind. “I just got you back. Don’t say that.”

She looks at him, so small and powerful in his arms, a force of nature stronger than Primfiya and as beautiful as it is horrid. Thinking of her on the other side of the door, living the horrible fate he thought he’d face…he can’t even stomach the thought.

“I love you, Marcus,” she says, healing him and fracturing him, putting him together and splitting him apart. Because those three words he’d convinced himself long ago he never deserved to hear, a sweet song not meant for his ears, a hymn meant for better angels, like Jake Griffin. He’d dreamt of it, of course, and when she came to him hours before his execution, she’d said as much without saying it at all – then, in Polis, said the same through her actions.

Hearing it like this brings a warmth that burns him.

“But I made my decision. My life isn’t worth more than theirs. I need you to pull eighty one names,” she finishes.

His lungs burn, as though the very air around them is radioactive. He can’t speak, but he can think – or at least, he can manage a few words that loop through the roar of nightmarish hell he’s living.

_I can’t lose you, Abby. I can’t._

How, he wonders, could he go on without her? How can he find his way out of the darkness without her, his light, the continual flame that showed him the path to becoming the man he always wanted to be? If she left the bunker, he knew he might as well go with her, too: his heart would be in her hands, part of his soul extinguished when her own stopped beating.

_I can’t lose you, Abby. I can’t._

If there’s one thing he knows about Abby Griffin, it’s that there’s no changing her mind. But that doesn’t mean he accepts this fate she’s chosen for herself, doesn’t mean because she’s given up on her humanity that he has, too. She’s made her choice, he thinks, but somehow, some way, perhaps he can convince her…

Abby lingers for a few moments longer, as if she expects him to say something, to get upset, to argue with her the way they’d done months ago across a Council table that’s now nothing more than melted metal. And perhaps the man he’d been when she looked at him in those meetings would have protested, would have blocked the door, would have debated with her and matched her logic and done his damnedest to rust her ironclad resolve.

But since she’s melted down that version of him and molded him into something new, something better, he keeps his lips closed.

She drops her hand from his chest slowly, as if relishing the feeling of him, and leaves without saying goodbye.

* * *

Clarke’s list is the way they survive, and that much, he knows. With the lottery dissolved, it’s their only solution: the only option left on a list of bad choices. It’s a resigned kind of certainty that leads he and Jaha to the decision, a corner into which they’ve been backed and the list is their only defense.

But that doesn’t make it easier for Marcus to watch the guards carrying away unconscious men and women Clarke didn’t mention, doesn’t take the pain out of realizing their methods rob parents and children of their goodbyes, husbands and wives of their chance at a last embrace. There’s no anchor for him now, no Abby Griffin at his side to push back his tears through her mere presence, and fighting the oncoming emotions proves harder than he estimated. Standing above them, watching the scene below…his lip starts to tremble, and he says the only though running through his aching head.

“This is how we save our people.”

And he can’t quite believe the cruelty of it all, the incredible, breathtaking ache that he hadn’t realized could get worse until it did. He descends the stairs with bones that feel broken, ready to tell the guards who Clarke’s list saves and who it leaves unmentioned.

They start with the Millers, who have fallen next to each other, side-by-side. Marcus tells them Nathan is safe, but his father is not, and just like that, David Miller – a survivor since the Ark, a man who had seen his son kidnapped by Mount Weather and battling members of the City of Light – will not see his son survive Primfiya.

The guards move to a few more people, closer and closer to the front, and Marcus says the phrase, “just their child,” more times than he thought was possible with numb lips and a throbbing, heavy heart. The pin on his jacket feels like it’s burning him.

Then he sees another pair at the front of the stage, standing next to _her_ , ready to lift her and carry her to the fate she chose, the fate Clarke opposes, and something inside him breaks. She is so much more, he thinks, than her actions in that lab. Abby Griffin is stronger than the trials she’s facing, essential personnel for more than just her medical skills.

She doesn’t have to find her humanity again, because she never lost it.

“She stays!” he almost yells, his voice stronger than he intended, drawing a few looks from guards who don’t quite understand his sudden outburst. _Yes, she stays_ , their furrowed brows seem to say. _She’s on the list, then_. They move on, but Marcus can’t.

The image of them bent down next to her, ready to lift her and carry her to the other side of that door, where she’d wake up in a few hours to the end of the world…it’s too much for him to process.

She’d go without him being able to tell her goodbye, to do his best to scrape together a few meager words that barely scratch the surface of how much she’s come to mean to him. He’d never again feel her arms around him, her lips on his skin, hear the sound of her laughter when he somehow – and he still couldn’t understand quite how – did something to bring it about. She’d never hold her daughter again, never braid her hair as she’d done before she left to find Raven, never treat another patient or hug Jackson after a long, tiring day of work.

Marcus Kane is not a selfish man, and he likes to think this was not a selfish choice. But a world without Abby Griffin would always be bathed in darkness, no matter if the sun returned after Primfiya loosened its grip on the world.

“She stays,” he repeats, shakier this time, accepting whatever fate is in store for him when she awakens. He knows this may condemn him in her eyes, this kind of denial of her explicit wish, a deaf ear to a verbalized decision. “She stays.”

She’ll be angry.

He expects her to wish she could lash out, wish she could give him the _how dare you_ he remembers so well from the days when they were co-Councilors and nothing more, for that familiar blaze to return to her gaze and burn until, he can hope, she accepts what he did. It’s a frail, delicate line on which he’s walking, just another moment when he understands there is no right choice to make, because both choices are wrong.

Since he is not on Clarke’s list, he can but hope she’ll someday find it in her heart to offer him forgiveness once again. But the real atrocity, he thinks, would be for the sun to rise on a clean Earth, and for Abby Griffin to be unable to see its beauty.

He kneels down on the floor of the bunker, the hard concrete making his knees throb with a pain he no longer feels. She’s so peaceful like this, all the indecision and regret and remorse wiped clean from her brow, her pink lips no longer trembling with tears unshed. In the horror around him, she somehow still manages to take his breath away.

Reality whispers that this might be the last moment he has with her, at least like this, as the man she loves. Far past the point of caring who knows about their relationship, he strokes the side of her face, caresses her cheek, tries to memorize the softness of her skin if this is to be the last time he’s fated to touch her.

“Forgive me,” he whispers, stroking her hair, and it’s as much a plea as it is a prayer.

* * *

She is the last of the chosen to wake up.

Marcus sits with her in Medical during the onset of the death wave, quietly wondering why she hasn’t yet opened her eyes when the rest of those on Clarke’s list have been conscious for a few hours. He has been saved by the absence of several of the list members – Clarke, Bellamy, and Raven didn’t make it back – and even if they hadn’t, Octavia made it clear she had no intention of letting him sacrifice himself to the flames of Praimfiya.

He feels no relief; just an exhaustion that aches through to his core.

Eventually a bleary-eyed Jackson gives him a chair, offering him a seat, his own worry betrayed in the rigidity of his posture and the shadows in his stare. He tells Marcus to radio him if anything changes. Nathan Miller is by his side, and they walk away hand-in-hand.

His heart is heavy with things he hasn’t said to her and questions he knows she won’t answer, things he no longer knows if he has any right to know. They’ve long lost communication with the kids – he has no news for her about Clarke or her whereabouts. He sighs. If the world were a better place, her daughter would be here next to her, waiting for her eyes to open.

She stumbles into consciousness slowly: a change in the cadence of her breathing, a flutter of her eyelashes. Although he knows what he’s done may change her view of him forever, he can’t help it: his heart soars.

“Abby,” he whispers tentatively, exploring, hesitant. “Abby.”

Her eyes open, and he can breathe again.

“Marcus?” she whispers, sitting up slowly, the cot beneath her squeaking as she shifts her weight. Her voice is hoarse, and she gives a tiny cough before she talks again. “Marcus, how…”

His hand moves as if to hold hers, but he reminds himself that she has the right to initiate that contact. He longs to comfort her, to soothe her, to do his best to tell her the way he sees her, but she had made up her mind.

She looks around, frantic, realizing this is not the outside of the bunker. That somehow she’s found herself back in Medical, and the death wave has already hit.

His mistake, he understands when he thinks back on this moment later, is in his hesitation. Because he didn’t speak, she did.

And that was when it all began to fall apart.

“How did this happen?” she asks, her voice flat.

“Clarke’s list dictated the people she thought it would be best for us to save,” he said, having already rehearsed this speech a hundred times while she slept. “We ran out of time with the riot, and-”

“And hundreds of our people died,” she says.

With a heavy heart, he nods.

“You knew,” she continues, her gaze hard, unyielding. She swings her legs away from him so she’s facing the opposite wall, talks to it instead. “You knew I made my choice.”

Here it is – the thing he’s been dreading.

“You were first on Clarke’s list,” he says, frantically trying to sidestep, wondering if he can convince her of her own merit based on her daughter’s logic alone. “You’re one of _two_ doctors in this bunker, Abby. I know what you told me earlier, but-”

“But you decided to ignore it.”

His blood runs cold as her voice changes. He can feel the distance between them widening, growing, shoving him away from her as solidly as if he’d been pushed. The room seems to cool, and he fights a shiver that longs to run down his spine.

“I decided to honor Clarke’s wishes,” he says, his voice soft.

“Is that it?” she snaps, still not facing him, her mouth a thin line. In the Praimfiya-soaked darkness, she’s trembling with rage. “Was that the _only_ reason you made that choice?”

He sighs. What does she want him to say? Does she want him to tell her he couldn’t imagine waking up to a world without her in it? Does she want him to say he’d rather have her angry at him and alive than in love with him and dead?

Or rather, as he thinks is probably true, does she just want him to leave her alone?

“I’ll leave you,” he volunteers, knowing she wants her space, standing and pushing his chair in a little although there’s no table to which it belongs. “You need to get some rest.”

“Answer me, _Kane_.”

His surname jolts him to attention, spreads an electric pain through him like he’s been shocklashed. Of all the things he expected from her when she woke up, for him to go back to being _Kane_ so quickly, without warning…it knocks the breath from his lungs. She hasn’t called him that in months, and it aches like a slap to the face.

Though he can’t bring himself to regret his choice – after all, it’s the reason she’s alive and sitting in front of him – he’s filled with a guilt he can’t quite push down and a slowly simmering anger to match.

“It’s the only reason that matters now,” he says, swallowing hard.

He can’t bring himself to turn around, so he walks away with sentiments stuck to his lips.

* * *

They hear from Raven a few hours later – in hindsight, he thinks it’s no surprise. If anyone could engineer a radio wave that would slice through the end of the world, it would be Raven Reyes.

“Kane?” she says, and Marcus gives Octavia a glance – offering to let her speak first, if she wants. She gives him a nod, an okay to proceed, and he answers her.

“Raven,” he says, relieved. “Are you…”

He trails off, unsure where the hell the kids could possibly be. They’re not in the lab, because the lab is wiped away, a distant memory. They shouldn’t, in theory, be anywhere on this planet…which, by association, means they shouldn’t have survived.

So how is he talking to Raven Reyes over the radio, in the middle of the death wave?

“We’re in space, Kane,” she says, sounding both confident and a little overwhelmed. There’s something unreadable in her tone, something he can’t quite place, but this doesn’t sound like the Raven Reyes he once knew. Chalking it up to escaping death’s clutches by mere minutes, as he suspected the kids had done, Marcus keeps going.

“Space?” he asks, incredulous. “How did you-“

“There was a rocket in the lab,” Raven says, and Marcus instinctively recoils a bit at the mention of the place, at the memory of the horrors it held for the woman he still, despite her iciness towards him, loves. “We didn’t have enough fuel to get us down, but we had enough to get to the Ark. Or what’s left of it.”

Marcus nods, accepting. It seems to be the only logical way he’s talking to Raven right now, and as crazy as it sounds, it might have been crazy enough to work.

“Is Bellamy with you?” Octavia speaks up and asks, her tone displaying a weakness she’ll only show around Marcus. He remembers Bellamy was the only one Octavia dictated would have a guaranteed spot in the bunker, and knows the uncertainty surrounding his fate must have caused her great pain. But, as the grounders’ newly-elected Commander, she cannot afford to show such weakness.

“Yeah,” Raven says, and again, Marcus senses something is wrong. He can’t shake a feeling of foreboding, a chill at the back of his neck, almost as if…

“Raven, is everyone all right?” he asks. “Who else made it to the Ark?”

Quiet, for a longer time than Marcus feels comfortable with. He and Octavia exchange worried glances.

“I’m up here with Bellamy, Monty, Harper, Echo, Murphy, and Emori,” Raven says, and Marcus hears her voice shake as she goes through the list.

He doesn’t want to accept what this means, what he thinks it must mean.

“Clarke?” he breathes, his chest tight.

“Clarke didn’t make it.”

Octavia frowns, the closest to a display of upset she’ll get for a fellow delinquent who locked her out of the bunker not two days before. But Marcus feels the floor slide out from underneath him, feels himself falling, falling, careening through time and space without a handhold.

“Are you sure?” he asks, doing his best to keep his voice steady.

“There’s no way she could have survived,” Raven said, and Marcus thought she might have been crying: at least, she was close to it. “Bellamy told me the nightblood didn’t work. She died launching the rocket.”

Sensing his heartsickness, Octavia took the lead.

“Then it was a good death,” she said, steady, unyielding. “Thank you for letting us know.”

They set up a plan for Raven to stay in contact with the bunker throughout the rest of the time until Praimfiya wanes, although Marcus only hears every other sentence. He can’t stop hearing those four awful words, those four words that broke the whole world open and set it on fire: _Clarke didn’t make it._

“I can tell her, if you want,” Octavia volunteers when Raven signs off, her blue eyes filled with understanding. Marcus wonders if this stems from empathy or simple logic: though he and Abby haven’t been speaking for a relatively short period of time, he's found news travels fast in confined quarters. Though once he might have been the best choice to break the awful discovery to their head doctor, now, he’s sunk to the bottom of the list.

“I think that would be best,” Marcus agrees slowly, feeling as though his insides have been removed and replaced with ice.

Octavia gives his shoulder a squeeze – a high form of affection, from a Commander – and leaves him to an empty room and a quiet radio, his thoughts alone for company.

All he can think is that because of his decision, Abby Griffin will now face the horrific burden of outliving her child.

* * *

There is a private vigil, a sort of unofficial ceremony, held a in remembrance of Clarke Griffin.

It is not attended by all – to many of the grounder clans, the name “Clarke Griffin” means nothing – but to others she is still Wanheda, the Commander of Death, and the loss of her power is a thing to mourn.

There are no flowers in the bunker, and they have precious few things of hers to place in a sort of makeshift memoriam. It ends up being a few candles and her father’s watch, which made its way to the bunker from Arkadia through an unknown channel (Marcus guessed either Abby or Bellamy, but would not see fit to confirm). Niylah makes a few symbolic blooms out of slips of paper, and when all is said and done, there is a heartbreaking beauty in the simplicity of it all.

Clarke Griffin would not have wanted an elaborate funeral.

Standing at the front, her shoulders slumped and shaking, he sees her.

Marcus has learned from Jackson that thus far, Abby isn’t sleeping or eating. She talks if spoken to, but offers no more than a few words in answer. She continues to refuse to be tested for what Marcus now knows (again, from Jackson) to be brain damage, although Jackson explained he has begun to doubt her symptoms. He says she’s not having seizures with the same consistency as Raven did, and that rather, her main symptoms have been consistent fatigue and nausea.

Both of which, Marcus thought, could be explained by the stress of finding a way to survive and worsened by the loss of a child.

When the ceremony ends, he moves to the front of the room, intending to at least express his condolences. He knows he must be the last person she wants to see – and he can’t say he blames her – but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t at least tell her he’s sorry for her loss: a loss felt by so many more than just Skaikru.

Seeing her is a special bitterness only reserved for what could have been, what should have been, the way things should have happened instead of the way they did. The emptiness in her gaze is a reminder that Clarke should have made it, that the kids should be in the bunker, and that he, Marcus Kane, was given a spot on her list that never truly existed.

Despite it all, the atrocious agony of the candles and the paper flowers and the tears, Marcus almost reaches out to hold her. It’s a kind of muscle memory that will erode with time, but for now, the air between them burns.

She looks at him with haunted, red-rimmed eyes, with hollow cheeks, with tears trailing down her face and slipping over her trembling lips.

“Abby, I’m so sorry,” he says, his own vision beginning to blur. It happens quickly, and the blur morphs into tears he can’t quite wipe away before she sees them. “I’m so sorry about Clarke.”

He’s apologizing for Clarke, but he’s apologizing for more. He’s apologizing for putting her in this position, for adhering to her daughter’s wishes and thereby trapping her in a world without the person she loved most. He’s apologizing that Abby Griffin cannot live in a world that deserves her ever-present kindness, that she must exist in a time and place that continually tries to snuff out the spark inside her. He’s apologizing because both mother and daughter deserved so much better than Earth gave them, and he cannot atone for those sins no matter how hard he tries.

“She was-” he starts, but can’t finish, the rest of his sentence: _a wonderful daughter and leader._ His voice shatters halfway through the second word, and before he knows it, he’s crying fully, the memory of Clarke Griffin’s smile and the hug she gave him before she left for the island too fresh in his memory to push aside. Marcus had always known the world was a cruel and unfair place, but for it to take Clarke Griffin, it had to be truly soulless.

As if reading his mind, Abby nods.

She reaches forward and takes his hand, pulls him closer with muscles weakened by fatigue, whittling away at the distance between them until it is nothing at all. Then, taking him by surprise, she wraps her arms around him.

As stunned as the first time she kissed his cheek, he does nothing at first – then, with tears trailing down his cheeks, he embraces her in return.

They cry together, weeping until they are the final two in the room, lit by candlelight: the cold light of mourning.

* * *

That night, a knock on his door is both a beginning and an ending.

Marcus still isn’t quite used to his new quarters – part of him feels he should be sleeping on the beds with the rest of his people, instead of being given one of the luxurious accommodations one level above – but as Chancellor and “clan leader” of Skaikru, he was all but forced to take up residence there. The room is bigger than his tiny space in Arkadia, the walls plastered with sigils and paintings to which he feels no connection.

The room feels empty, and not just because it’s large.

He hears a knock once, a tiny sound, barely audible in the darkness. Octavia or Indra, he guesses, because he cannot bring himself to hope it might be someone else, someone with whom he stands on shaky ground. Getting his hopes up for that might destroy him, and he steels himself before he stands from the wooden table and opens the door.

It’s her.

Abby Griffin stands in the corridor, staring up at him with red-rimmed eyes. He assumes she hasn’t stopped crying since he left, and why would she? Losing Clarke is undoubtedly the worst kind of torture she’s endured, and she was already cracked before that news shattered her, her heart porcelain that fell from a shelf.

Her hands, at her sides, are shaking.

“Marcus,” she says, her voice trembling, flickering like the lights in the bunker, “I’m sorry.”

Too many feelings course through him at once – relief, happiness, despair, doubt – and, in an attempt to process all of this, he finds himself unable to speak. But she knows him, understands what he’s saying without words. Of course she does.

He steps aside from the door, inviting her in, and closes it behind her. She stands awkwardly in the space, her tiny frame set alight by the few glowing lights he’s turned on overhead, golden light framing her head like a halo. Her lower lip is trembling, and even though he isn’t quite sure where they stand, he has to make sure she knows.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he reassures her, insistent. He maintains a respectful distance because he isn’t sure what she wants, isn’t sure how close is too close for her right now. Her daughter’s funeral was one thing, but this is another: he’s jumped over a boundary already and might spend the rest of his life trying to find his way back to the other side. “Abby, I know…I know you didn’t want this. You told me what you wanted, and I went against it.”

She shakes her head, scattering the light on her brown hair. “You did what was right,” she says, taking a step closer to him. “What Cl-”

Her voice breaks, and it’s never pained him so much to be uncertain whether she wants him to hold her.

“What she wanted,” Marcus finishes for her, saving her the burden of saying her daughter’s name. Abby wipes a tear before it can travel down her cheek, sniffles, nods again.

“It was the right choice, Marcus,” she says. “It wasn’t what I wanted, but…in a way…”

He swallows hard, knowing where her sentence is going.

_In a way, it’s Clarke’s last wish._

They’ve moved closer without realizing it, drawn together by some kind of gravitational pull, only inches apart. Even in the low light he can see flecks of orange amber in her brown eyes, a light not dulled by the pain he finds there.

“I know,” he says, because he does. He knows what she means, he knows her pain, and he knows that the burden of Clarke Griffin’s loss is too heavy to be shouldered by her alone. She’s the strongest woman he’s ever known, the bravest, the kindest…but this is not a weight her soul is meant to hold by itself.

She knows.

She steps closer, wraps his arms around him, buries her face in his chest. And even in the heartbreak of it all, the agony crashing down around them, something feels as though it’s clicked back into place: something missing has been found, something lost has been restored.

He holds her close, strokes her hair, rocks her gently. Comfort has never been a thing he’s been good at giving, but love gives instinct to fill in gaps where his offerings lack. He trails his fingers up and down her back, feeling sobs shake her, realizes he’s crying, too.

This is not her burden to bear alone, and neither is her faulty conscience.

He remembers what she said on one of the worst days of his life, knows what it is to be so lost inside yourself that finding your way back to the person you used to be – or the person you _want_ to be – seems impossible. But Abby Griffin is not gone, she has not been wiped away with the storm that rages outside. She will not rise from the ashes, because she was never reduced to them in the first place.

She clings to him, and he tells her.

“You haven’t lost your humanity, Abby,” he says, and she leans away a little, looking up at him again. “You’re the same as you always were.”

She frowns a little, not bothering to wipe away the tears on her cheeks.

“How can you say that?”

“Because the choice you made…you made it out of guilt,” he says. Guilt is a familiar thing to him, an old enemy, and he remembers its embrace well. He will take it upon himself to pry her from its clutches. “If you’d lost yourself…lost what makes you human…you wouldn’t have wanted to sacrifice yourself to atone.”

She looks at him, quiet tears dripping down her cheeks, and he knows they’re both remembering a time when he almost did the same thing. When he almost stole the air from his own lungs so his people could breathe, but he chose too late.

Self-sacrifice was not the path to healing, as it turned out.

That healing was in front of him, in his arms, a mirror to his own pain and magnified by a loss too great for words.

“I’ve never felt this lost,” she says, her voice breaking. “Marcus, I can’t-”

“It’s okay,” he reassures her, but she shakes her head, her lips a trembling line.

“I haven’t told you,” she said. “I should have, but I didn’t.”

 _Brain damage,_ he thinks, silently giving thanks to Jackson for sparing him the blow of learning about it after he learned about Clarke.

“You don’t have to,” he says, both of his hands on her shaking shoulders. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it together.”

It’s half a statement and half a question, and something in his heart blooms again when she gives him a halfhearted smile.

“There are things you can’t fix, Marcus,” she says. “My brain is one of them.”

He swallows hard. He hadn’t thought about how those words would sound when she said them aloud, firmly convinced she’s dying, and he knows without her confession that her brain was part of the reason she was determined to be outside the bunker. As she sees herself, Abby Griffin is nothing more than a drain on resources.

“Jackson told me,” he admits, and her lack of reaction makes him think she might have assumed as much. “But he also said he didn’t think you’re showing symptoms, Abby. That you’re not like Raven.”

She shakes her head. “It’s the only explanation,” she said. “They used an EMP on me, too.”

Marcus strains to remember their conversation, the brief discussion they had about symptoms.

“Have you had any seizures?” he asks, hoping she’ll be honest with him.

“No,” she answers – her gaze is honest.

“Any hallucinations, besides in the lab?”

She shakes her head, stronger this time. “Marcus, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening,” she insists. “Just because I’m not showing it the same way as Raven-”

“Can Jackson test you for it here?” he asks, slowly moving his hands from her shoulders to hold her own.

“Yes,” she says softly. “We brought the equipment.”

They look at each other and make a decision without speaking – he squeezes her hand, and she moves into his arms again.

He whispers the words into her hair, hopes they aren’t unwelcome, that perhaps they’ll be healing.

“I love you, Abby,” he says. “Always.”

And in that, a promise – _no matter how you doubt yourself, your humanity, your chances of survival…I will never doubt you._

They fall asleep in each other’s arms that night, and every night from then until Praimfiya ends.

* * *

The radio buzzes with static, and Marcus jumps – Raven’s early. Octavia, calm, looks at him and waits for him to answer.

“Raven?” Marcus says, confused, but not unpleasantly so. Each day he has concrete proof the kids are alive is a good day, and if she chose to radio early…he won’t protest. “Are you there?”

“Kane?” says a different voice, quieter, softer. A voice he’d been told he’d never hear again, because that voice was lost to him – and the person he loves most – forever.

Across the table, Octavia’s eyes flash.

“Clarke?”

There are tears in her voice, a sob muffled by distance and failing technology.

“I didn’t think…would work. Raven…had reason…thought I was…”

Marcus can feel his heart thumping against his ribcage, forgets for a moment that while he is Chancellor, Octavia is Commander, and technically he can no longer issue her orders.

“Get Abby,” he says, stern, praying the connection holds long enough for Abby Griffin to hear her daughter’s voice. “ _Now_.”

Thankfully, Octavia does not choose to tell him the Commander answers to no one, least of all the leader of Skaikru. Instead she bursts from the room at a full sprint, turning left, her footsteps clanking down the stairs as she makes her way toward Medical.

“Clarke, are you there?” he asks. _Please, please. Please._

“I’m here,” she answers, the connection slowly solidifying.

“Raven told us...” he trails off, gives his heart a moment to stop racing. “We thought you were dead.”

“She had…to think that,” Clarke says, part of her sentence intercepted by white noise. “They lost me on the way to the rocket…launched manually.”

It checked out with Raven’s story, right down to the detail where she survived. Marcus felt like jumping, like running through the halls of the bunker and yelling the news. _Clarke Griffin is alive._

“…is my mom?”

“It’s been hard for her,” Marcus says, chest aching. “She misses you. What she did in the lab…she has a hard time with it.”

“She did what she had to do,” Clarke says, echoing words he’s said to her time and time again. “…the right choice.”

Footsteps sound in the corridor, and Marcus looks to the doorway to find a teary-eyed Abby standing, silhouetted by the white light of the bunker, Octavia at her side.

“She’s here,” Marcus says, aiming a smile in Abby’s direction that she returns with ease, though she covers it with her hand when she hears Clarke’s voice. “Would you like to talk to her?”

He steps away from the radio and Abby enters the room.

For the briefest of moments their fingers intertwine, her eyes sparkle with a light he’d only begun to see returning to her eyes. They’re waiting on test results – apparently, they didn’t have the materials for Jackson to simply scan her brain – but right now, in this moment, he has no doubt that the woman before him is healthy and whole.

He leaves them to their privacy, and for the first time in what feels like a century, he walks down the corridor with a smile.

* * *

They sit in Medical, waiting for results that have, at last, become available.

“It’s not brain damage,” he says quickly, instantly, his smile bright and glowing. “Abby, your brain is fine.”

She stiffens, her hand tightening in his.

“That’s…it’s impossible. I had a hallucination. My hands were shaking.”

Her voice gets quieter as she talks, and he thinks she might have begun doubting her own conclusion. Just this morning she woke him up with the sound of last night’s rations hitting the bottom of the garbage can, and he jumped out of bed to hold her, to soothe her, to offer her a glass of water and rub her back when it was over.

They’d sat on the carpet of his room together, her in his arms, a quiet promise between them to figure out what the hell was happening to her body, to her brain. So Marcus decides to ask the obvious question: “If it’s not brain damage, then what is it?”

Jackson freezes, as if suddenly realizing he’ll have to break news _other_ than that Abby Griffin will survive five years of Praimfiya. He looks from Marcus to Abby and back to Marcus again, glances down at the papers in his hands, and takes a deep breath. He settles on Abby when he speaks.

“Pregnancy,” he says, and just when Marcus Kane feels like his world has started spinning again, it stops.

_Pregnant?_

“Jackson, I have an implant,” Abby says, apparently unconvinced. “How could I be pregnant?”

Jackson stares at her for a few moments, as if trying to figure out a decent response, as if wondering how his mentor, the head doctor, hasn’t figured this out already.

“Implant failure,” he finally settles on the two words that get his point across the easiest. “The EMP didn’t have an effect on your brain, but it must have destroyed your implant.”

Abby’s frown loses some of its depth, and Marcus feels his own stomach beginning to churn. He doesn’t know much about contraceptive implants; the sum of what he understands is that they limited every woman on the Ark to one child, and were – at least to his understanding – extremely effective. But they probably hadn’t been built to withstand high-intensity electrical charges, to outlast a power surge that expelled a vile artificial intelligence program from Abby Griffin’s head.

“Are you sure?” Abby says slowly, as if with each word, she adjusts to the potential reality to which her test results are pointing. “Jackson, I don’t-”

“Here,” Jackson says, extending a hand to Marcus with a stack of papers in his grip. “Look at the results for yourself, if you’re not convinced.”

Abby snatches the graphs and charts from him almost instantly, which is probably a good thing because he wouldn’t have had the slightest of ideas where to begin. Her gaze narrows as she pages through the data, and when she hands the papers back to him, she swallows hard.

“This is impossible,” she says again, but there’s no conviction in her words.

“Improbable,” Jackson corrects her quietly. “Not impossible. Your symptoms weren’t all evidence of brain damage, Abby. And with a fried implant…”

 _Not impossible,_ Marcus thinks. _Definitely not impossible._

It wasn’t as if they hadn’t spent nine days together in Polis before the world ended, exploring each other, finally savoring the wonderful twist of fate that allowed them to slow down, to have time for each other, to consummate the thing they’d left unspoken for so long.

Abby looks at him, and he knows they’re both thinking about Polis. The puzzle pieces fall together between them, assembling as their eyes meet, and they both reach for each other’s hands at the same time.

_Pregnant._

He notices something in her eyes then, a glimmer he hasn’t seen since he left her on that last fateful day in Polis. Something has come back to life inside her, something the lab and the testing and the bunker door dimmed, and he’s so grateful that symptoms were not what they might have been and that once, just once, the world has decided to be kind to them.

He decides to worry about fatherhood later. Of course, that will be a panic all its own – Marcus Kane did not have a father worth thinking about, let alone speaking about – and he will strive to be the exact opposite of what that man was. But he did have a mother, the guiding light for him throughout his childhood, and he knows Abby will be just as excellent a parent to their child as Vera Kane was to him.

For now, he looks at Abby Griffin, stunned and clutching his hand as though he’s the only thing keeping her steady in a world that’s shifting and bending around them. His heart has already expanded in his chest, made room for a new member who he hasn’t yet met but already loves with all his soul. A warmth spreads through him that courses through his veins like fire, and when Jackson offers to give them a minute, they both nod.

“This is…” Abby breathes as soon as Jackson is out of the room, still holding his hand. “I never thought…”

“It’s unexpected, I’ll say that,” Marcus says, raising an eyebrow and offering her a warm smile. “But why would you start being predictable now?”

Staring at him with wide eyes, caught somewhere in limbo between breaking down and smiling, she does something he never anticipated.

For the first time since they’ve been in the bunker, Abby Griffin laughs.

She rests her head on his shoulder, and all is well.

* * *

They both cry on the day she’s born.

Marcus cries a few times – the first time because he knows she’s in pain and he’s powerless to stop it. He knows as much about labor as he does about being a father, which is to say, next to nothing. But he knows Abby is screaming and sweating and clutching his hand for dear life, and he’s screaming for Jackson to help her because why is she in so much pain, why is she screaming, is there nothing that can be done?

Jackson reassures him that this is normal, that childbirth is a painful process, but that there was nothing abnormal about Abby’s situation or symptoms. She will be fine, he says, but he’s free to leave the room if it’s too much for him to witness. In the pointed look Jackson gives him, Marcus assumes the process is too much for many men to withstand seeing.

Like hell, he’d leave Abby Griffin.

This is a pain he can’t ease for her, and just when it breaks him down to the point where he thinks he might shatter…

Vera Jacobine Kane bursts forth into the world.

Jackson places her swaddled form in Abby’s arms first, and although she’s exhausted, her eyes well with tears as soon as their daughter’s tiny form is hers to hold. Abby can’t take her eyes off of Vera, holding her as she cries, fending off the complete exhaustion inherent with bringing a new life into the world to say her name, hold her close, tell her she loves her.

Marcus leans over the bed, and for a moment, their eyes meet. He’s crying, too – he has been from the moment Abby said their daughter’s name – and they share a weightless, buoyant smile, a promise, an unspoken oath they’ll keep for the rest of their lives. He presses a kiss to Abby’s forehead, brushes a strand of soaked hair away from her face, and she sighs a tired, hopeful little sigh.

“Hello, Vera,” he whispers, as his daughter sees him for the first time. He wipes his cheeks, and thinks he might be able to compose himself, but that’s a lost cause – his heart has broken in half, and now both mother and daughter have a piece. “I’m your dad, and I love you. I love you so much.”

“She’s so beautiful,” Abby whispers, and with every fiber of his being, Marcus agrees. It's a strange thing to be in the thrall of a being who has been in the world less than a day, but looking down at her wisps of brown hair and dark eyes, Marcus Kane knows he would die for his daughter.

Abby asks if he’d like to hold her, and Marcus, temporarily overwhelmed by the fear of failing at this first parental responsibility, can only find the strength to nod. Her smile widens, and she knows exactly what’s going through his head: if there’s one thing in which Abby Griffin excels, it’s at interpreting him when no words have been spoken.

She transfers Vera into his arms, and the process is seamless – his fears and worries have been for naught, as usual. Her smile is bright, sparkling, but worn down, and Marcus urges her to get some rest.

“We’ll both be here when you wake up,” he says, and it’s a promise, a vow, that there will never be a day that Abby Griffin wakes up without he and Vera by her side.

“I have ten minutes left in me,” she asserts weakly, and if he weren’t so overwhelmed, he would have given her the skeptical look that under any other circumstance he knew she’d expect. Instead he just smiles and shakes his head, because even after bringing their daughter into the world, the woman he loves is finding ways to surprise him.

That said, he’s not shocked when her breathing evens out and her eyes slip closed only a few minutes later. Her body has won out over her mind, and she could hardly have expected her brain to win this battle.

Vera stirs in his arms, gives a soft coo, and before the previous tears had dried he’s begun to cry new ones. She’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, so tiny and innocent, both his mother’s and Jake Griffin’s namesake; the product of his love for Abby and a memory of those who are so entwined in their hearts that they are sewn into the fabric of their beings.

“I love you, Vera,” he says, and only a few feet away, he sees the corners of Abby Griffin’s mouth quirk upward in her sleep.

* * *

It’s remarkable, he thinks, how quickly four years pass despite the fact that the world has ended.

Clarke keeps in touch with the bunker as best as she can, although without a Raven Reyes radio, the signal on her own is often weak. She has found a safe place, a bunker of her own, with enough food for her to make it through five years. Apparently, Becca planned for _every_ possible scenario.

Raven keeps in touch as well, though her communications are less and less frequent as time passes. Not because she and the kids aren’t fine, but because they _are_. They contact the bunker to reassure them that they’re all right, that everyone is fine. Contacting the rest of their people probably feels like a bit of a chore when they’re floating thousands of miles above the planet, and although Marcus wishes they’d offer him a bit more reassurance, he reminds himself that they are not, and never have been, kids. Their strongest duty is to each other.

The bunker holds, just as it was meant to, with only minor technical flaws that take less than a day to fix and are never fatal. As Chancellor he helps solve problems and resolve minor disputes, but overall, the clans get along better underground than they ever did above it. Surviving Praimfiya has given them a common ground they never would have explored on their own, and he sees something beautiful in that unity.

There are more beautiful things in this apocalyptic world, starting with the first sight he sees when he opens his eyes each morning – the first sight he sees on that fateful morning, the first day of the rest of their lives.

Abby is still asleep, never having been a morning person: she existed on coffee alone when they were aboveground, and adjusting to rising early without it was a learning curve for her. Today, though, there is no rush for her to awaken, no need for her to be in Medical at the strike of eight.

Even after five years of this – of falling asleep with her in his arms and awakening to her beside him – the sight of her is enough to take his breath away. In sleep and in waking, she is ethereal, stunning, perfect in every way imaginable. Something brings his words back to him, the ones he told her years ago, back when the future felt like a question and she gave him an answer that felt like a punch to the gut.

_You saved me, and not just by opening that door._

She’d saved him every day since then, he thinks. Just because she brought him back from the brink of darkness did not mean Abby Griffin couldn’t show him more and more of the light, and every time she told Vera a bedtime story, every time she made their daughter laugh, every time she held Marcus’ hand or stroked his cheek, every time she smiled…she saved him all over again.

He likes to think that perhaps he saved her, too, that the demons of her past no longer lay claim on her soul. There are still times when she wakes from a dream with tears in her eyes, moments when he holds her in the dead of night, soothing her while their child and the rest of the bunker sleeps. But they grow less and less frequent as time marches on, and he can hardly remember the last time he awoke to tearstains on her pillow.

Now, with Vera asleep in the next room and Abby asleep in his arms, all is well.

And of course, because today is the one day on which she is allowed to sleep, she opens her eyes only minutes after he opens his.

“Morning,” he whispers as her eyelids flutter open, as he awakens her with a soft kiss to the bridge of her nose. She smiles, the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkling with the gesture, and although this is by no means the first time she’s smiled at him when she awakens…it’s enough to make his heart swell in his chest.

Perhaps it’s the date, perhaps it’s the sense of fate that hangs heavy in the air all through the bunker today, but he’s reminded of how close he came to losing her. How quickly it all could have been erased. How, if things had been different, the walls in his room might still be bare instead of decorated with Vera’s many pages of artwork (“She’s taking after her sister,” he’d said weeks ago). How, if things had been different, the right side of his bed might be cold instead of warm with the heat of her skin. How, if things had been different, the room adjoining his might still be vacant.

A day has not gone by in which he hasn’t given thanks that things are no different than the way they are now.

Abby answers him by leaning forward, rolling onto his chest and positioning herself between his legs, ever returned to the woman he knows and adores. He laughs, but not too loudly – Vera is asleep, after all.

Abby angles her head downward and kisses him, the softness of her mouth against his and the sensation of her fingers in his hair enough to make him shiver despite the warmth of their bed. She laughs, her lips stretching into a smile as she gives him another slow, deep kiss and rests her forehead against his.

“Morning, _Chancellor_ ,” she murmurs, treating him to the grin of which he’ll never tire, an expression she saves for Vera and him alone.

 _So it’s a ‘Chancellor’ morning,_ he thinks with a smile.

Her hands travel down his chest, making their way lower, and he gives a stunned, startled cough. She laughs against his mouth.

“Marcus…”

“Vera’s still sleeping,” he says, but it isn’t a ‘no,’ because his hands move from his sides to anchor her against him, to stroke the scars on her back, to trace back the years they spent changing from adversaries, to friends, to lovers, to parents.

“She won’t be awake for another hour,” Abby says with a glance at the clock, peppering kisses to his cheeks, his jaw. “Which leaves us an hour to work with.”

Her eyes have a mischievous glint that makes his heart race, makes the underwear he’s worn to bed grow tighter. He loves her like this, his rebel, echoes of the woman he thinks he might have loved even when they hated each other.

“To think you called me a terrible influence,” he mutters, and she smiles against his skin.

“We’re both terrible influences,” she says. “That’s why this works.”

He grins, and she kisses him again, he moans into her mouth as her fingers work their way around his shaft and she frees him of his underwear, and…

“Moooooooom! Daaaaaaaaaad!”

They both freeze for a few moments until Vera repeats her loud declaration, and Abby rolls off of him with a sigh.

“Should we both…” he trails off, knowing fully well he needs to take a shower, and quickly. Abby rolls her eyes, props herself up to give him one last kiss.

“I can handle it,” she says, with a pointed glance at his groin. She smirks, he stares at her, messy hair and dark eyes, and feels himself falling even more deeply for her.

She gets out of bed first, blocks Vera’s view of him as she opens the door to her room and stands there.

“Good morning, honey!” she says, and he can see the smile in her voice. “How did you sleep?”

“Good,” Vera responds. “I had a dream about Clarke again.”

“Clarke?” Abby says, and Marcus’ smile widens. He knows he should be getting out of bed, taking care of…things, but these moments are too precious to miss.

“Yeah,” Vera says. “She hugged me.”

Abby glances back at him, still laying in bed, and they share a smile.

“You’ll get to hug her today, honey. For real.”

“For real?” Vera asks, with all the skepticism of a four-year-old who can’t quite comprehend the vastness of the world outside the bunker, a realm into which she’ll wander for the first time today.

“For real,” Abby insists. “And she’s very excited to meet you.”

“Yaaaaaaaaaaay!” Vera exclaims, and Marcus hears her clapping her hands even though she’s a room away.

“But you can’t meet her if you don’t clean up your room,” Abby says, and Vera gives a little huff of rage that reminds Marcus so much of her mother that it causes him a physical ache.

“I don’t wanna,” she says, and as usual, Abby navigates the situation with ease.

“But you want to meet your big sister, right?”

“Yeah!”

“Then clean up your dolls,” she says. “Clarke told me she wants to see your room, and you want it to look nice for her, right?”

A rustle as Vera gets out of bed, hurriedly organizing toys Indra and Octavia made out of scrap metal and husks of corn. Marcus doesn’t know if anything useable survived Praimfiya, but he knows more than anything that he wants to find Vera a real doll. If only to see her face light up when she receives it.

“Come get me when you’re done,” Abby says. “I’m going to be in the bathroom with daddy, getting ready for our day.”

“Okay,” Vera agrees, and Abby closes her door a fraction – not all the way, but enough to obscure most of her view of her parents.

“If you’re waiting for me to join you, that window has closed,” Abby whispers.

As much as he loves her like this, lighthearted, happy, his mind is elsewhere. So he climbs out of bed and moves toward her: she meets him in front of the bathroom door with a question in her gaze.

“I love you,” he murmurs as soon as they’re inside, and as quick as she was to laugh earlier, her lower lip begins to tremble.

He’s not sure if _I love you_ was the wrong thing to say, but he feels the need to atone for what must have been a mistake.

“Abby,” he says, taking her face in both of his hands, “what’s wrong?”

She shakes her head.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she says. “I just…I never thanked you, Marcus.”

He frowns, confused, moving his hands from her face to her shoulders. “Thanked me for what?”

“For this,” she whispers. “For _giving_ me this, when I thought I wasn’t worth it. I…I can’t believe…”

The bathroom lights shine overhead, making her teardrops sparkle like diamonds.

“There’s nothing to thank me for,” Marcus says, holding her close, reminded of that moment years ago when holding her hurt more than he could say, thankful that wound healed quickly and easily. “I love you, Abby.”

She reaches up and strokes the side of his face, runs her fingers through a beard that is turning more grey with each year that passes. There are lines on their faces that weren’t there five years ago, streaks of silver in her brown hair that were once chestnut. Time has done what it always did – moved them into the future – and with the past all but expunged from their hearts, they decide to discard it and move forward.

Today is a new dawn, a new day, and they will leave their doubts and fears in the past, where they have always belonged.

She stares at him, her gaze soft and full of adoration, and she thinks he might know what she’s about to say before the words have left her lips.

“You saved me,” she says, and his heart skips a beat. “And I don’t just mean by keeping me inside the bunker.”

He presses a kiss to her lips, sweet and slow, disbelieving that even after all these years his words have stayed with her. But now is not the time to look back: now is the time to look forward. To build a new world, a better world, one built on a foundation of peace instead of war. One where old judgments and bad blood have been swept away, leaving behind forgiveness in their wake.

* * *

Hours later, when the door to the bunker opens for the first time, they see the new world together.

Vera sits on his shoulders, amazed by the amount of green in the wilderness around her. Polis has long been swept away, but the forest remains: life has continued on, ignoring the end of the world, enduring Primfiya much like those below the surface.

Clarke isn’t here yet – she’s waiting for Raven and the others – but she’ll be here soon. She’ll meet her sister, she’ll hug her mom, and they’ll be a complete family again.

Abby turns to him with a smile, interlocks her fingers with his, presses a chaste kiss to his cheek.

From the ashes, they have risen.


End file.
